Making sense of Twitter and Google Pageranks

Why is the Google Pagerank for my Twitter profile the same as Lance Armstrong’s?

So I have a bit of an obsessive personality. One of my latest obsessions is Twitter and another that I’ve for a much longer time is Google Pagerank.

Over the years I’ve found that there are 3 good rules to continuing to see your Pagerank go up:

1. Create good content consistently over time with an eye to using thoughtful keywords
2. Always be on the lookout for new high quality inbound links, and
3. Send Google blogger Matt Cutts a nice bottle of Scotch at Christmas

This is of course a very simple formula and there’s a lot going unsaid in my rules, except for the “Matt Cutts Scotch” rule which is really straightforward.

But here I am with my new Twitter obsession and I’m finding myself at a complete loss as to how Google is determining the ranking score for individual user pages. I’m assuming that the “send Matt Cutts Scotch” rule isn’t applying so I’m looking to the first two and namely the second one, because inbound quality links is a very powerful factor in a page’s Google rank.

So let’s take my Twitter page to begin with at http:www.twitter.com/kgrandia . I have 5 links back to my Twitter account and a Google pagerank of 5 out of 10, I have 1,500 followers and I’m following 1,100 people. I post new “Tweets” on Twitter about 5 or 6 times a day.

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Improving your blog post’s search engine friendliness - Tip #1

I’ve been blogging full time now for close to three years and have been reading and talking to a lot of people over the years about the best ways to improve the targeted traffic I get from Google and the other search engines for any one particular blog post I publish.

I thought I would start to share the things I’ve learned that have worked well (and not so well) in a series of blog posts. These are more or less random tips, so my #1 tip isn’t necessarily the most important. After I do ten or so I’ll do a post that ranks them. So here goes.

Tip #1 - Internal Linking

Everyone is always talking about the importance of getting high quality links from other blogs and websites, and while this is hugely important many people overlook their own internal linking.

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Warning: Wordpress shuns Google by default

Okay, I admit that I to use overly dramatic headlines, but I wanted to grab your attention, especially if you’ve just started using the blogging software Wordpress. And please use Wordpress as it is by far the best blogging platform on the market.

But you see, there’s this little niggly default privacy setting on Wordpress that tells Google and all the other search engines that you’re not interested in being indexed in their search results. What you will see in the source code when you first install Wordpress is a piece of code that looks like this:

<meta name=’robots’content=’noindex,nofollow’/>

This little piece of code is known as a ‘no index’ instruction for search engine ‘robots’ in that it tells search engines to not index your pages in their search results. So Googlebots (also called spiders) show up to index your site and that nasty piece of code tells it you’re just not interested in being part of their search results.

I’ve written about this problem before but I was only suspicious that this was a default setting and I thought it was more likely that I had screwed up (which is usually the case). But I finished the basic install for a new blog I am making for someone as a Christmas present and lo and behold there was that ‘no-index’ instruction.

Here’s the instructions for how to turn this no-index instruction off, it’s really very easy:

1. Go to the admin section of your Wordpress blog

2. Click on the “settings” tab in the top right corner

3. Click on the “privacy” tab in the blue bar

4. You should see a section now called “blog visibility” that looks like this:

(click to enlarge)

5. Make sure that it is set to: “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.”

If this doesn’t work (it did for me), then there are some more technical fixes out there, just google something like: “no index code wordpress” and you’ll see lots of great ideas and information.

Seriously, does anyone have any idea why Wordpress would have this as the default setting?

Walk before you run: Google releases Search Engine Optimization 101 Guide

The first thing you learn in baseball is how to hold the bat (remember to line up your knuckles) and its pretty hard to go any further with the game until you figure this out.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different. There’s a whole world of amazing resources that discuss the day-to-day minutiae of SEO, and my two favorites are SEOmoz and SearchEngineLand.

However, before you dive into the technical details of How Google Improves Search Quality Through The User Interface I would suggest that you take time to understand the fundamentals. Just so happens that Google released a short and sweet beginner’s guide to Search Engine Optimization today.

So dive right in, the water’s fine and after you nail down the basics you’ll be talking Differential Diagnosis: A Broken Website Ranking Atop Google with the best of them.

A quest for video search success

So you might have noticed that I like to post a lot of cool video content to this site. And if you know me, you know that it’s because I like to laugh. So I’ve decided that I might as well put all this video posting to good use and try to optimize for a solid, medium competitive keyword that will bring TMOW a nice bit of consistent traffic.

The term “video” and “funny video” are out the question given the massive amount of competition, but I think I’ve found a good keyword combination that I could aim to get stuck in the top 20 by January or so.

Here’s a screen shot of the Google Keyword tool results for “video” where the search term I’m aiming for is listed:

Any guesses which keyword combination I’m going for?

I will report back on any tricks I learn along the way. Video has never been an area I’ve competed for high search engine page results, so I it’s think a valuable excercise given the massive search volumes for some of these terms.

Beware of the Wordpress ‘noindex’

Are the search engines possibly ignoring your Wordpress blog because you’ve unknowingly been plugging ‘no index’ code into every post and page?

Wow, so I was just about to write a post about basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) codes for bloggers when I thought, “Gee I better check the source code on TMOW before I go telling other people what to do.”

And lo and behold, guess what’s pops up? This evilness:

<meta name=’robots’content=’noindex,nofollow’/>

This little piece of code is known as a ‘no index’ instruction for search engine ‘robots’ in that it tells search engines to not index your pages in their search results. So Googlebots (also called spiders) show up to index your site and that nasty piece of code tells it you’re just not interested in being part of their search results.

In other words, potentially millions of adoring fans have been missing out on all the funny youtube videos I’ve been posting lately.

You’ll notice that there is a ‘no follow’ instruction in the code above as well. ‘No follow’ tells search engine robots to not follow any hyperlinks you include in the page. Relative to the ‘no index’ instruction,
the ‘no follow’ is not as big of a deal, but the combination of these two pieces of code and you are totally banishing yourself to internet irrelevance.

As I’ve found out the hard way, the easiest way to screw up and include ‘no index’ code on your Worpress site’s source code is to mess up the privacy settings.

I’ve never changed any of the privacy functions on The Meaning of Web and if I did it was totally by accident and I really deserve a slap upside the head. If I didn’t, then that means that the ‘no index’ code was a default setting either for this theme or for the Wordpress download.

Most likely it was my fault, but I just wanted to put this post up to ensure others aren’t unknowingly doing the same thing. It’s easy to find out if you have ‘no index’ code on your site, just go to the main page of your website, click the ‘view’ tab in your web browser (I’m using Firefox) and click on the ‘page source.’

You’ll get something that looks like this:

An example of page source with no follow text

Click to enlarge and you will see the ‘no index’ ‘ no follow’ code in the third line from the bottom.

If you do see something that looks like this in the source code of your Wordpress site: <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

or this, <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”>, and you don’t want it there, here’s the easiest way to fix it:

1. Go to the admin section of your Wordpress blog

2. Click on the “settings” tab in the top right corner

3. Click on the “privacy” tab in the blue bar

4. You should see a section now called “blog visibility” that looks like this:

5. Make sure that it is set to: “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.”

If this doesn’t work (it did for me), then there are some more technical fixes out there, just google something like: “no index code wordpress” and you’ll see lots of great ideas and information.

Would be great to know if anyone else has encountered a similar problem with Wordpress.

UPDATE: Alright, its only been about 5 hours since I turned off the “noindex” and “nofollow” code and its already paying off. Woohoo:

Click to enlarge

Social media and SEO reading for the train

I ride the train a lot and its where I have the luxury of at least an hour a day of uniterrupted reading on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media.

I thought I would share what I read from time to time. So here goes:

Reddit Updates Widgets, Launches FireFox Plugin, and Updates Their Site

Search Engine Optimization and User Behavior

Customer Service and Reputation Management the Twitter Way: A Case Study

How to Change the World Using Social Media

How Audi Uses Viral Marketing

An SEO is Not a Link Builder

10 Tactics to Rank Higher In Search Results

The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan